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Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist, molecular biologist, and geneticist. One of her photographs was key to discovering the structure of DNA.
©️Rosalind Franklin University
While so-called "recreational" DNA tests are popular among genealogists, did you know that it was a woman, Rosalind Elsie Franklin, who first discovered DNA? Let's look back at her story.
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist, molecular biologist, and geneticist. She was born on July 25, 1920, in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. She was the second child and the eldest daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in London.
At 11, she enrolled at St Paul’s Girls’ School — one of the few schools where physics and chemistry were taught to girls. Rosalind Franklin was brilliant and passionate about these subjects. She received a university scholarship at the end of her schooling, allowing her to attend the famous University of Cambridge.
Graduating from Cambridge in 1945, Franklin went to Paris, where she studied with a World War II refugee and former student of the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Adrienne Weill. She then joined the Central Laboratory of Chemical Services to train in X-ray crystallography.
In 1951, back in London at King’s College, Franklin decided to apply her expertise in X-ray crystallography to the study of DNA. There, she worked for some time with the physicist Maurice Wilkins, before their relationship deteriorated.
Franklin then worked with her student, Raymond Gosling, with whom she produced the first X-ray diffraction images of DNA. These images helped identify the double-helix structure. Franklin detailed this discovery in several scientific papers. The Photo 51, taken by Franklin, was crucial for the subsequent research by James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick, both recognized as co-discoverers of the DNA structure.
In 1953, in disagreement with her colleagues, Rosalind Franklin decided to leave King’s College to join Birkbeck College, where she studied viruses and RNA, laying the groundwork for structural virology.
That same year, Watson and Crick, along with Wilkins, published various scientific papers on the structure of DNA in the journal Nature. Only Wilkins mentioned Franklin’s role and the importance of her discovery for their work. The three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962.
Franklin never found out. She died in 1958 at the age of 38 from ovarian cancer, likely caused by overexposure to radiation. The fact that the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously reinforces the "Matilda Effect," a term theorized by Margaret Rossiter, which describes how female scientists rarely benefit, or benefit very little, from the impact of their research, often to the advantage of men.
Today, Rosalind Franklin’s work is increasingly recognized. She received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 2008 for her remarkable contributions to fundamental research in biology and biochemistry.